On rare occasions, you may accidentally delete something from your Knowledge Base or lose content due to a hardware or software error, such as a power failure, a corrupted hard disk, an operating system error, or a bug in RemNote. To reduce the risk of permanently losing your notes, RemNote automatically takes backups in many cases and provides a way to restore them.
If you've lost some Rem but aren't sure if you need to restore a backup specifically, try the quick steps in Help! I deleted my Rems or they've gone missing! first.
Finding a backup to restore
Backups can come from several sources.
Daily Backups
If you are a RemNote Pro subscriber or Life-Long Learner, our cloud servers automatically store a backup of your Synced Knowledge Base every day, unless it has not changed since the previous day's backup. All Daily Backups are retained for at least 60 days, unless you delete your RemNote account. (Backups older than this will likely be available as well, but only some of them will be retained and the details of which ones are retained may change from time to time.)
If you have access to Daily Backups, you can download one by choosing Settings > Account > Navigation > Daily Backups.
Local Backups
If you're not a Pro subscriber or you're using a Local Knowledge Base, but you do use the desktop app, you will have local backups available for that knowledge base on your computer. Again, these are taken once a day unless you don't start the app.
Local backups are stored on your computer's hard drive, in the backups subfolder of a folder which you can find at the Local Storage Location displayed in your Knowledge Base's settings (click on the name of your KB under the “Knowledge Base Settings” heading in settings to get here).
Other options
If you're a Free user and never use the desktop app, there are no automatic backups directly available to you. However, if you've experienced significant data loss, you can contact us and we may be able to retrieve an older copy of your Synced Knowledge Base from the server. We can't make guarantees about whether we'll have a usable backup for restoration, and it will likely take some time to complete, so if you haven't lost very much data, it may make more sense to simply create your lost Rem again.
If you've manually backed up your knowledge base recently (see Making a manual backup, below), you can also restore from that backup.
Restoring a backup
Once you've found a backup, you'll want to restore it. The procedure will differ somewhat depending on what you've lost.
If you've lost or completely destroyed an entire Knowledge Base
If there's nothing left in your Knowledge Base that you want to keep:
If you still have any Rems in the Knowledge Base, choose Settings > Account > Knowledge Base Settings > Advanced Settings > Delete all Rems to clean everything up.
Choose Settings > Import or click here while logged into RemNote.
Choose the RemNote tile.
Select the backup that you want to import (see the previous section, Finding a backup to restore, if you're not sure how to find one).
Click Open.
If you want to recover specific Rems from a backup
If your Knowledge Base is mostly fine, but you've accidentally deleted or lost some specific Rems, you can import a backup into a new Local Knowledge Base and then retrieve the specific Rems that you need to restore. (Importing the whole backup directly into your main Knowledge Base can't be undone except by restoring another backup, and it can create a huge mess if the backup turns out not to contain what you expected. In particular, if you've slightly changed a number of Rems between now and when the backup was taken, they'll all be added to your main Knowledge Base, creating many near-duplicate Rem.)
Download and install the desktop version of RemNote if you don't already have it.
From the user drop-down in the upper-left corner, select Add New Knowledge Base.
Give your new KB a name, choose “Local Only” for the type, and choose a folder on your hard drive to place this temporary KB in.
Click Create Knowledge Base.
Choose Settings > Import or click here while logged into RemNote.
Choose the RemNote tile.
Select the backup that you want to import (see the previous section, Finding a backup to restore, if you're not sure how to find one).
Click Open.
Explore your knowledge base to find the Rems that you need.
Transfer the appropriate Rems into your knowledge base using one of the following methods:
Copy and paste them. This is particularly easy, but may lose some amount of data on occasion (for example, flashcard review history).
Export the documents you want to transfer to the Raw Backup (JSON) type. To do this, choose Export from the document menu, the … in the upper-right corner of the document. Then import the resulting files into your main KB.
When you're done with the temporary knowledge base, clean up by choosing Settings > Knowledge Bases > … button below the appropriate KB > Delete Knowledge Base.
If you're not sure what backup to restore
Sometimes you might not be sure when you lost your data, so you may need to check several backups to find a version that contains what you've lost and is still reasonably up to date.
Pick a backup to check first and follow the instructions for If you want to recover specific Rems from a backup, stopping at step 9.
Remove all Rems from the temporary KB by choosing Settings > Account > Knowledge Base Settings > Advanced Settings > Delete all Rems.
Repeat steps 5–9 above until you find the appropriate backup, then continue to steps 10–11.
Making a backup manually
If you're a Free user who doesn't use the desktop version or you're feeling particularly paranoid, or you want to transfer the data in a Local Knowledge Base to a different computer, you can export your entire KB in the RemNote format by choosing Settings > Export and Backup > RemNote (Complete) and downloading the zip file. This backup doesn't include your RemNote settings, but it includes everything else in your KB.
The backup can later be restored using any of the methods described above in Restoring a backup.